In
recognition of Micky's extraordinary life, which spanned two world wars
as well as most of the major social, sexual and political developments
of a
turbulent 20th century, a feature-length documentary was premiered in
London during the 56th BFI London Film Festival, October 2012. The
cinema trailer can be seen by clicking on this link - www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAZk5GoW33A

The
production is based on Micky's autobiography 'Turned Towards the Sun', on numerous interviews with him carried out over a number
of years, and on a comprehensive film record numbering into the
hundreds of hours of often very candid footage.

Given the
complexity of Micky's involvement in so many seminal events, any film
must choose very carefully on which amongst so many possible
avenues of development to concentrate. In the case of 'TTTS' the
director, Greg Olliver, has chosen to concentrate on Micky's unlikely,
but very successful, military career as a wartime Commando; as an
extreme left-wing Socialist who, having so recently espoused National
Socialism, found a spiritual home amidst the often socially-deprived
boys who made up his Troop; as a gay man who found validation in the
uniform of Britain's military élite, winning a Military Cross
for his actions during the most complex and successful Commando raid of
World War Two; and yet also as a Wykehamist, Oxford undergraduate and
budding author, who needed to dip an occasional toe into the
world into which he had been born, but should have despised, by means
of an occasional visit to the Ritz, to Berkeley Castle or to the homes
of priveleged and powerful families such as the Mitfords.

Over
the course of the film, whilst paying homage to Micky's more rarefied
intellectual ambitions, Greg Olliver sets his sights squarely on
Micky's revisiting of his wartime adventures, following him during his
late-life return to Saint-Nazaire, the target of the Commando raid
mentioned above; to Colditz Castle, where Micky helped to run the
secret radio - whilst delivering Marxist lectures to an audience some
of whom were not in the least appreciative, and to Munich, to the old
Osteria Bavaria where, in the mid '30s he had met for the first time
with Hitler while in the company of his friend Unity Valkyrie "Bobo"
Mitford.

Although predominately a gay man, amongst whose lovers
was the KGB double-agent Guy Burgess, Micky sought, and eventually
found, a form of conventional happiness in the arms of a woman - in
this case the beautiful socialite Mary Booker, who became his wife and
with whom he lived a sometimes idyllic, sometimes penurious, married life
in distant North Wales. Mary was far from his first relationship with
often adoring women: and in fact the letter which forms the background
to this text is one amidst a long and revealingly frank - on both sides
- correspondence with a beautiful young woman who remained madly, if
unrequitedly, in love with Micky until her untimely death in 1942.

Unfortunately
for would-be readers, 'Turned Towards the Sun' is not currently in
print, for which reason I have included below my own tribute to a
friend much-missed, whose text contains excerpts from TTTS such as both
illuminate the narrative, and serve to demonstrate the fluidity of
Micky's inimitable writing style. All material is, of course,
copyright, as set out at the conclusion of the piece.

CAPTAIN MICHAEL CLIVE ‘Micky’ BURN, MC

74087: King’s Royal Rifle Corps and C.O. 6 Troop 2 Commando

‘Wild-wagered youth, call, cause, crusade,What a world we might have made!’

(Extracted from his poem – ‘Until That Night’)

Prologue

Michael
Burn, half-drowned, shaking with cold and shock, is dragged onto the
narrow steps below the lighthouse at the tip of Saint-Nazaire’s
Old Mole. Cannon fire from approaching British ships strikes jagged
chips of granite from the structure’s seaward face. All around
him is a psychedelic nightmare of multi-coloured tracer, blinding
searchlights and roaring flames.

Not more than fifty-feet
away, drifting slowly westwards with the tide lies the blazing wreck of
Motor Launch 192, the diminutive warship on board which he and his men
had so recently sailed on what was to be a great adventure. In mere
seconds the German batteries had reduced her to a barely floating tomb
within whose fires his beloved 6 Troop was now dying, friend by
friend; Lance-Sergeant Maurice ‘Boy’ Harrison – for
whom Micky bore an unrequited love, his patrician subaltern Lieutenant
Tom Peyton, Fusilier Lenny Goss, Corporals Reg Tomsett and Norman
Fisher, and all his other fellow travellers in what had been for far
too brief a time, a shared Utopian dream.

This moment of
epiphany marks the end, for Micky, of a social, sexual and political
odyssey that has carried him from exclusive Winchester School, via the
indulgences of Le Touquet and Oxbridge, through the authoritarianism of
Fascism, to the late adoption of an equally radical Socialist ideal so
perfectly realised, until this awful moment, by all the boys in his
Troop.

Behind him, lost forever in the darkness, lie the
castles, villas and country houses that have marked his passage through
a sometimes poisonous cocktail of doubt and self-obsession: before him
looms the bleak reality of mere existence as one amongst numberless,
similarly humbled, prisoners of the Reich.

‘Turned Towards the Sun’

Micky
was born December 11th, 1912, to Clive (later Sir Clive) and Phyllis
Burn, in fashionable Mayfair, London. He was the eldest of four
children, the others being his brother Alan and his sisters Stella and
Renée. In his youth Micky was especially close to Stella, with
whom he would later share the same burdensome sexual ambiguity. Most
holidays were spent with her in the family villa at Le Touquet, the
casino resort in the Pas de Calais, the tale of their joint
rebelliousness (some might say delinquency) later being recalled by him
in his book ‘Childhood at Oriol’.

Le Touquet loomed
large in the story of the Burn family, the Golf Hotel and casino having
been founded by Micky’s maternal grandfather Allen Stoneham, on
the basis of money acquired during the Kalgoorlie gold-rush (much of
this later lost in a bitter divorce). The surrealism of such a
backdrop, with all its temptations and superficial values, seems a
world away from Micky’s later espousal of the plight of the
‘working man’; yet its impact perhaps informs his continued
need – still very much in evidence at the age of 97 – to
recapture, occasionally at least, the echoes of a once gilded past.

‘In
front of our villa the road curved to the populous beaches and shops
and villas of Paris-Plage a mile away. Across the road the golf links
merged into more dunes that hid beaches still unfrequented. I was very
close to Stella then. Our names were said as if they were a single
name; part of our childhood years together were spent on joint
conspiracy in mischief.’ ‘There was a little opera house in
the casino. Stella and I went to performances of La Boheme, Carmen,
Louise, and came to know many of the words by heart.’ (TTTS pp
20-1)

All a very long way indeed from the grinding poverty that
would have characterised the childhood of most of the men he would one
day come to lead, even if - contrary to appearances - the family were
not particularly wealthy by the standards of their contemporaries.

Micky
was educated at Winchester, one of Britain’s élite and
confusingly girl-free public schools. It was founded by William of
Wykeham, as a consequence of which all who attend it are known as
“Wykehamists”. Micky is currently the third oldest
surviving Wykehamist, and claims to have been seduced by the second
oldest as part of his first uncertain fumblings into a sexual tributary
then forbidden, and still referred to, sadly, as his
“weakness”.

His time there, again in an
atmosphere of artificiality, again being surreptitiously tutored for
life within the upper ranks of Society, still failed to turn him into a
conformist. Beset by myriad confusions, not least an increasingly
unsettling awareness that the privilege of his life thus
far was shared by only a fortunate few, his obvious intellectual
ability was undermined by reactive petulance and even the occasional
episode of pilfering. He thought too deeply into the mechanics of a
social structure his contemporaries seemed to accept without demur, and
first explored religion as a means of restoring order to a young mind
in turmoil. In his book he recalls one particular sermon –
‘..not so much delivered as hurled at us by the chaplain in
charge of the School Mission in the slums of Portsmouth. His words were
javelins.’ The sermon (TTTS p33) had a profound effect on
Micky, castigating as it did, the failure of the élite they were
about to join, to recognise and work to improve the plight of the
working man. Of all the chaplain’s adjurations one stands out as
particularly germane to Micky’s eventual exploration of credos
sometimes violently at odds with those of The Establishment: ‘I
am a cuckoo. A cuckoo is a bird that lays eggs in the nests of other
birds. I have been laying some ugly, subversive eggs in this beautiful
snug nest of yours. Who among you will hatch any of them out?’

From
Winchester, as expected by his parents, Micky went up to Oxford. But
again conformity lost out, and he quit after the first year writing of
this time that...’I was not sent down. I simply did not come
back. The social seductions at Le Touquet had begun to take hold, the
immediate seductress being Mrs Syrie Maugham (ex-wife of Somerset
Maugham). Along the road from the Golf Hotel she had rented a villa
called Maison Elisa. Introduced by an acquaintance of my parents with a
dramatic past, her guests captivated me. Towards the end of the summer
vacation I began to realise that I had not done a stroke of the work
the University expected, and became scared. Tim Birkin (Sir Henry
Birkin, most famous of the “Bentley Boys” at Le Mans), the
motor-racing ace, arrived and asked me, since he had heard I wished to
become a writer, to ghost his autobiography.’ (TTTS p41)

This
was published as “Full Throttle”, and followed up by
“Wheels take Wings”, a history of the Brooklands
race-track. (The story of the writing of Birkin’s autobiography
was dramatised in 1995 - www.imdb.com/title/tt0212959 - with Rowan
Atkinson playing Birkin, and Crispin Bonham-Carter as Micky).

For
Micky writing, initially at least, took the form of journalism, to
prepare for which he attended the Pitmans School of Typewriting and
Shorthand. Thus ended his formal education, an abrupt departure
mirrored by the similarly untamable Stella who managed to get herself
expelled from her private girls’ school. Together she and Micky
continued to “live within Society” while all the time
poking fun at it, Stella particularly railing against both the lush
world into which they were being thrust, and the diminished roles women
of that period were encouraged to accept – irrespective of any
talents they might possess.

During this period work still
came second to the delights of Le Touquet, where Micky virtually lived
in Syrie Maugham’s villa. This lifestyle could hardly have been
further removed from the austere Commando existence within which he
would later find fulfillment and a treasured sense of belonging.
Noteworthy guests were coming and going all summer: they included
Victor Rothschild and Serge Lifar, the successor to Nijinsky, who
danced at the casino. Of Lifar Micky writes, ‘We hired horses and
he galloped, without reins, along the main road, like a Cossack’.
(TTTS p46)

This was 1933. The end of the summer season should
have seen Micky settle down to work: instead of which he
“fled” to Munich, taking a room at one Mark per day and
putting his charm, good looks and impeccable manners to best use. Here,
and having at one time been reduced to living on bread, milk and fruit,
new friendships amongst the monied butterflies who during the thirties,
seemed to do little but flit from one fashionable spa to another, saw
him elevated to a Schloss in Austria frequented by those who he
describes as “headline” people. ‘They were rich,
hospitable, widely read, elegant, one or two beautiful, and for a spell
they dazzled me. For a spell...slums in Portsmouth were
forgotten.’ (TTTS p49) This, of course, at the very time the
Nazis had come to power and conditions within the concentration camp at
Dachau were being studiously ignored by the many who wished only to
appease Herr Hitler.

From the Schloss, another invitation took
Micky to Lake Como, in Italy, where he was a guest of Lady Chelmsford.
When this concluded his next port of call was as a guest of Mrs.
Keppel, one time mistress of King Edward VII, at her ‘..palatial
Villa dell Ombrellino’. (TTTS p51) All but broke himself, Micky
continued to live quite shamelessly off the wealthy and influential,
who were offering a form of asylum from conformity;
however, when the invitations ran out and he could no longer
prolong his adolescence, he was left with no choice other than to
return to London and face up to the inevitability of life as a working
drudge.

Attractions – sexual

During
all this period of confusion relating to his place in the world, Micky
was undergoing a parallel confusion as to his sexuality. In 1933, just
a year before joining the “Gloucester Citizen” as a
journalist, he had met the putative KGB agent Guy Burgess at an
undergraduate cocktail party in Trinity College, Cambridge. Having just
completed “Wheels Take Wings” Micky was wearing a
Brooklands tie clip and as a consequence was approached by Burgess, who
had a passion for racing cars.

‘He invited me back to his
rooms in college and I stayed the night. I saw him quite often during
the ensuing years. He had been at Dartmouth Naval College for a year,
then at Eton, where…he got a history scholarship to Trinity. He
made no secret of being a homosexual and a Marxist.’ (TTTS
pp59-60)

Micky describes his appearance as ‘..blatantly
carnal, exuberant, outrageous’. With his deeper side as yet
hidden, he came across as of the “Bacchus-Oscar Wilde”
school.

After the war, when charm had been replaced by something
else, Micky remembers him as ‘..seedy, neurotic, and on the last
occasion, sinister’. But in 1933 ‘he…was
erudite….drove fast cars…had blue eyes and tight wavy
hair, was a good swimmer and looked menacingly healthy. I have seen his
looks described as “boyish”; he did convey a dash of
pertness and sham-innocence, as if he had just run away after ringing
some important person’s doorbell. Untidy myself, I did not much
notice his untidiness (squalor, according to some
narrators).’ Others decried his lack of debating ability, but:
‘For me he was the most stimulating talker I had so far
met.’ (TTTS pp60-1)

Burgess then was very self-assured,
which Micky puts down to his requited love affair with Marxism, which
philosophy seemed to provide the answer to everything.

‘Most
of the time during which I first knew Guy… Gossip came next to
Marxism and sex among his plats du jour…social gossip, political
gossip, literary, especially homosexual gossip; of which last there had
been a high tide that very spring of 1933 in Cambridge.’ (TTTS
pp61-2)

‘While Guy was still at Trinity, I spent a couple
of weekends as his guest. He presented me to one or two of his
contemporaries, and older showpieces among the dons and Fellows. One of
them was the eccentric ex-country clergyman F.A.
Simpson….(who)…so Guy informed me, had been in love with
Rupert Brooke.’

‘One night we went to Oxford in his
MG to see the OUDS in Max Reinhardt’s production of “A
Midsummer Night’s Dream”. The production, with the elves
and fairies “following darkness like a dream” into the
floodlit shadows of Magdalen deer park, was enchanted. We drove back
the same night to Cambridge. I enjoyed this period of our friendship. I
was twenty, Guy two years older. It was exhilarating to be admired by
someone who had known, as I had not, how to make the most of his
brains, his scholarships, and life in one of the most famous colleges
of a famous university. Yet even at the beginning I felt moments of
unease.’ (TTTS p65)

In the autumn of 1934, at age
twenty-one, Micky began work for the “Gloucester Citizen”
newspaper. He rented a cottage in Painswick and his mother came to
stay. ‘All that too brief time we began to cease to be almost as
if strangers, she with her agonising shyness, and I with something I
could not bring myself to declare.’ (TTTS p66)

On p96
Micky expands upon the strain of living one life at home while yet
guarding the secret of his other, alien, existence. ‘One day late
in the Thirties (around the time Micky would have been in the
“Queen’s Westminsters”), my father came to me in his
rare severe mood, and said that he had just put down the receiver on
someone calling himself “Jack”, who wanted to speak to me.
“Who is this Jack?” A friend of mine, I told him. I
forget the exact reply, but the gist was that “the Sergeant-Major
has a record of every call or visitor coming to this house”. (The
referred-to “Sergeant-Major was the retired military gentleman
who controlled all access to No. 10 Buckingham Gate)

It
put me in an inward rage. Why should I, and the hundreds of thousands
like me, submit to this surveillance? I must either tell him, let the
truth be wrenched out of these contemptible concealments, or I must
leave home. I did neither, and until the Thirties ended and war
separated us all, life went along on the surface easily enough.’

‘I
had good friends of both sexes. There was nearly always some man with
whom I was futilely in love. I kissed girls at dances, scuffled through
soft porn in the Charing Cross Road and ever and anon cruised the
Parks, or took a bus to Silvertown or Wapping and from distances
admired youths in the beautiful unposed attitudes of manual labour. I
went out late to wander streets and squares, alone, alive, a flame
without a hearth. Lights in upper windows taunted most piercingly. I
watched as they went on, and the curtains were drawn across, and those
below went out, and the ache to enfold, to be enfolded, became almost
unbearable. The assurance of a place to return to after work, and of
somebody loving and beloved to lie down with and wake up with, seemed a
blessing great enough to compensate any hardships of the
day…. I learned how the mechanism of concealment spun off
into repellent side-effects. Homosexuals, whether practising or not,
perforce became practising hypocrites. Merely by remaining silent in
the presence of the snigger and the sneer, I turned into an accomplice
and felt shame. It shamed me to be relieved that physically I did not
look like the general view of “one of those”. I did not
make up, or sneak out in drag. I was not a limp-wristed teapot. The
brazenness of Guy Burgess had embarrassed me.’ (TTTS pp96-7)

Micky
joined The Times, in 1936, which action, as detailed on p97, made him
‘of political significance to Guy.’ Flattery, as usual, was
one of Guy’s primary weapons. ‘He had been a
master-flatterer from the start, when his aims were sexual. Regularly,
when we first met, after presenting me to some new friend, he would
report or invent compliments. “Who is that beautiful young
man?” had asked, reputedly, Anthony Blunt. “He reminds me
of Rupert Brooke”, had said, allegedly, the Revd. Mr. Simpson.
‘He now began to slip in praise for my writing. He had done the
same with Goronwy Rees, who told me of it many years later.’
(TTTS p97)

‘I did not respond when Guy suggested we should
share a flat in London.. . Now and then I went to bed with him. But for
some while I had felt myself to be falling under a dangerous spell
which had only incidentally to do with politics and much to do with
sex. I wished to learn about women and discover what my emotions
towards women really were. I imagined, so far theoretically, a profound
experience with a woman, and finally life with a woman, to be one of
the immortal openings into life which, the more time I spent with Guy,
became that much the more obstructed. I saw less of him. My advances to
girls were fits that never got beyond starts, or starts that never
fitted. Unhappiness began to seep, then surge, into my hitherto rather
happy nature, until I perceived that some of the twilight youths who
hung about the West End of London were not there for the late-night
shopping or the theatres. Occasionally during the pre-war years I made
friends with two or three who, for money, tranquilized me. Not always
only for money. They too were looking for a friend. Guy meanwhile
continued cheerfully promiscuous……and looked extremely
well on it.’ (TTTS pp97-8)

‘One day I
read….of a big case brought by the police against the personnel
of a male brothel in the heart of London. It dawned
on me that my encounters were against the
law. I had understood the need for extreme caution because of the
condemnatory attitude of society, and the shock exposure would cause my
parents. The law had not crossed my mind nor had the danger of disease.
What I was doing did not appear to harm my companion, who was always a
good deal less innocent than myself. Where to go was a problem: but one
of them solved it by taking me to a small, inexpensive hotel in the
Buckingham Palace Road, run by a good-natured ex-policeman and his
wife, who felt sorry for men in our kind of plight.’ (TTTS p98)

Desperate
for advice, Micky contacted the officer, at Scotland Yard, in charge of
the case mentioned above. A meeting was arranged. ‘He received me
pleasantly, agreed that our interview would be confidential and seemed
quietly flabbergasted when I told him about my sexual dilemma, and how
I was solving it, but had now realised that my solution was
illegal. Obviously...he could not advise me to continue breaking
the law, however discreetly. He warned me of course. He asked for
no names or denunciations of youths he might have considered my
accomplices, which…he would not have got, shook my hand, and as
I went said, “One day I’m sure you’ll find a
woman”.’ (TTTS pp98-9)

Micky, at this stage, had no
knowledge of Guy Burgess’s great secret, which was of his KGB
allegiance. He therefore was surprised by Burgess’s
“stunned” reaction when he told him he had been discussing
his illegal homosexuality with a senior policeman in Scotland Yard.

‘This
occasion was one of the first that came back to me after his defection,
when I understood what a blow my story must have struck him.’
(TTTS p99) ‘It was some time during 1937 that our relationship
declined.’ (The physical relationship, at least: however,
Micky’s position with the Times ensured he remained of interest
to Burgess the spy).

In the above text Micky is being
less than honest about the women in his life. From his father he had
learned to dismiss the opposite sex in terms of their social and
political importance – his father would at one crucial juncture
utter the phrase ‘The women don’t count’ – this
perspective perhaps explaining Micky’s failure to appreciate the
cost to the women who loved him prior to Mary, of emotions expressed
and demonstrated, but only very rarely returned.

While working
in Gloucester Micky satisfied his social conscience by raising money to
establish a club for the unemployed of the area. Meanwhile he continued
to pursue his life-long flirtation with the “Top People”,
by spending “the odd weekend” at Berkeley Castle as a guest
of Molly Berkeley, from Boston, who had married the Earl of Berkeley.

In
the early years of the war a particular weekend guest at Berkeley would
be the ill-starred Dinah Jones, beautiful ingenue daughter of Sir
Lawrence and Lady Evelyn Jones, of Cranmer Hall, Norfolk.

Until
relatively recently Micky had been keen to avoid the subject of his
years as the love of Dinah’s life. Now, perhaps
in a belated attempt to lay
the ghost of his habitually cavalier responses to her
genuine feelings, he has made her letters to him available, and they
show someone of great depth and compassion who was sadly to die of
tuberculosis on Christmas Day, 1942 - a virgin, unmarried, and still
devoted to the one man she must have realised she could never possess.

Describing
one of their visits, Micky writes that: ‘Berkeley Castle, exotic
enough in peacetime, seemed completely out of the world the weekend I
took Dinah there. Most of the rooms were under dust-sheets, (and) old
scientist Lord Berkeley almost in his winding-sheet. (he died a few
months later) But Molly Berkeley had given Dinah one of the huge
tapestried bedrooms; “the promise of heaven and scandal in that
room,” Dinah wrote afterwards, “and my bed – long
enough for six people down and six across and the fun of WHICH SIX one
would choose – and the intoxication of knowing only one would be
wanted, anyway for long”. ‘ (TTTS p159)

Referred to
in “The Flying Castle”, his narrative poem about Colditz as
“a mortal angel…” Micky had known her:
‘since 1935, when she was eighteen, I twenty-two, a guest at her
parents’ house in Norfolk. She was lovely, unsure of herself, and
a little worried – needlessly – because she thought she was
too tall.

‘While I was training at Moffat I had written
and invited her to come to stay. She came for two weekends in summer
1941, staying at Mr. and Mrs. Butler’s Star Hotel (where Micky
and Tom Peyton were billeted). She told me on our first evening that
she had fallen in love that time in Norfolk and remained in love ever
since. Men had courted her, but she had never had a lover. Now she was
twenty-four, I twenty-eight. I told her what I was coming to believe
about my sexual nature. It did not change her. She waited a few days,
then sent a letter of sheer joy at recognizing that “the
chance is over of my feelings being some fabulous myth built up
out of ignorance and lack of opportunity. It was a wonderful
weekend…the room with the pink duvet and Mrs. Butler’s
meaning looks, and walking up the town with the rush of flowers and
eyes behind every curtain, and walking round the pleasure grounds and
your men sitting on seats with girls and no boats on Sundays. I long to
be there always;” and after the second weekend, coinciding with
the Commando sports day (photo above): “I shall never forget the
sports, coming suddenly and late into a blaze of sunshine and you
winning [the hurdles]. Remember to send the photographs, though to be
seen and taken unawares and foreshortened squinting into the sun is no
one’s hope of immortality, but you will want them for your
memoirs and I in any case;” and later, when I sent them, she
called them “a split second of Happiness, witnessing a tug of
war”. In a postscript she put, “Will you write for after
the week-end and make it as HONEST and CRUEL and BARE as you
can.” When I did, “You said you couldn’t help feeling
callous,” she replied, “but to feel nothing isn’t
callous. I don’t have any compulsion for feeling anything. That
for me you are someone to love, and the most important and lasting,
doesn’t mean that you should feel compelled to show affection.
That would be too cynical and a mockery”. ‘ (TTTS pp158-9)

Always
hoping that somehow circumstances would allow their liaison to be taken
to a more physical level, Dinah had been disappointed at Berkeley and
in Mofatt. There would be one, final, opportunity, this arising on the
eve of Micky’s departure for Scotland, he having been made aware
of the imminent possibility of action by his C.O., Colonel Charles
Newman.

‘The night before I was to return Dinah and I
had dinner together. I could not, after all we had been and all we had
not been to one another, just kiss and say goodbye, good luck, and
thanks for everything. We went to 10 Buckingham Gate, where
I was staying. The bomb which had killed the two air-raid wardens had
pulled down the whole of one side of the building, but a bedroom on the
other side was safe. We went to bed together for the first time and I
was impotent. In the morning, to take her home to her parents’
flat, I took the taxi from which I saw Charles striding along the Mall.
I have already described how he drew me aside and said excitedly,
“This is it!” Dinah and I drove on and said goodbye. Nine
months afterward, in January 1943, while I was still in Spangenberg, a
letter from my mother told me that she had died of tuberculosis.’
(TTTS p161)

While stationed in Mofatt, and while still very much
involved with Dinah, Micky became the subject of another girl’s
affection – these more conventional liaisons perhaps reflecting
Micky’s desire to be, or at least be seen to be, other than he
was. Her name was Mora Hope-Robertson, later to become the writer, Mora
Dickson. They met when Micky appeared at the family home to arrange
accommodation for two of his men. Regular hops in the Baths Hall
provided the opportunity for her, dressed in Hope-Robertson tartan, to
teach him the Highland Fling. She wrote of this time that: ‘I was
fathoms deep in love and the whole troop knew I was their
Captain’s girl.’* The whole troop perhaps, but not
Micky, who yet again failed to register either the depth, or the
importance to her, of the precious emotions being directed towards him.

At
the end of the war, Mora too was to find herself in the back room of
bombed-out Buckingham gate. As with Dinah, Mora was hopelessly innocent
and trusting. Micky undressed her. In bed he lay on top of her. She
asked, in her innocence, if this meant she was going to have a baby. It
went no further than this. (*p93, “Nannie”, by Mora Dickson, Lochar Publishing, 1998)

As
the following section deals with Micky’s sojourn in Munich, it
should also be noted that during this period he began a relationship
with the Baroness Ella Van Heemstra, mother to the future film star
Audrey Hepburn – at the time Micky first knew her still a young
child at school in Elham, Kent. Ella, along with her husband, had been
a member of the British Union of Fascists.

According to Micky, and enlarged upon in
the documentary film 'Turned Towards the Sun', the two indulged in a
brief fling based on her unconventional sexual tastes. They remained
friends until after the war, at which time her letters, which form a
part of Micky's extensive archive, suggest she wished to rekindle their
relationship. In response to Ella's pleas for assistance during the
harsh post-occupation struggle to survive in Holland, Micky sent
quantities of cigarettes which she could use as barter on the Black
Market to obtain medicines for the now sickly Audrey – whom Ella
had unwisely returned to Holland prior to the outbreak of war believing
her daughter would be safer there.

Attractions – political

It
was while he was with the “Gloucester Citizen” that Micky
returned to Munich, he and his family always having regarded Germany,
rather than France, as the cultural heart of Europe. The timing was
important, as he was arriving in Germany at a time in his life when the
need “to do something” for the working man was really
beginning to take hold, and at a time when Hitler was regarded by many
as having cured unemployment and given Germany back her soul.

The
timing of Micky’s move to Germany is important in three respects:
for a start he was getting on for 23 and now working for a living; then
there was the revival of interest in social justice mentioned above;
and finally there was the fact that Hitler had now been in power for
two years and the “benefits” of National Socialist zeal and
order were now beginning to show in both German society and the Germany
economy.

Amidst a turmoil of propaganda for and against
Hitler, Micky ‘…interviewed a delegation of the British
Legion (founded 1921) ex-servicemen back from a goodwill mission to
Berlin, who had met Hitler and been impressed. He had “cured
unemployment”. He had built roads. He had “given Germany
back her soul”. The young were passionate for him. I had to go.
Like a child in the womb, I had heard enough voices from
outside.’ (TTTS p69)

Micky drove to Germany in his elderly
car, via Le Touquet, in August 1935. His purpose, ostensibly, was to
investigate the darker side of National Socialism and atrocities which
had been alleged, but about which Micky was personally sceptical.
‘Once in Munich I could ask for the necessary laissez-passer to
investigate..’ or, utilise his friendship with Unity
(Bobo) Mitford, a British socialite who
had gone out to Germany and fallen in
love with Hitler: he was, after all, both comfortable with, and at the
same time beguiled by, her grand milieu.

Much of Micky’s
record of this period comes from carefully preserved letters to his
parents. He freely admits that they paint a less than admirable picture
not only of his own attitudes at that time, but of those human traits
that periodically encourage malevolent minnows to grow into monsters.

Had
he succumbed to the temptation to destroy them, ‘…I would
have been destroying some of the guts and heart of truth not only about
myself, not only about a period of history, but about an ever-renascent
flaw in human nature. Thanks to my archive, and a good memory, my
personal sample of the virus of wishful thinking has been retained in a
state of all-too-admirable preservation.’ (TTTS p70)

Excerpts from the letters describe his path to Hitler through “Bobo”.

Munich,
16 August, ’35: ‘Bobo Mitford is terribly grand and very
nice. People think quite seriously that she is going to marry Hitler,
who gives her lunch parties in his flat. But as she does not like
asking him favours, I am not likely to see him through
her…’ (TTTS p70)

22 August, ’35: ‘Bobo
and I lunch every day at the restaurant (the Osteria Bavaria, now
Osteria Italiana) Hitler lunches at. The head-deputy for foreign
journalists said that it was best to go up and speak to him, as he
likes Englishmen.’ (TTTS p70)

‘Bobo makes up a great
deal and when she went into our restaurant the last time a German girl
made a face at her, as Hitler is supposed to hate make-up. Hitler then
came in, stopped at our table and
spoke to Bobo, and then summoned her to lunch with
him, make-up and all. The German girl burst into tears of
disillusionment as she had remained ugly for his sake. They are
hysterical about him.’ (TTTS p71)

Micky, still with the “Gloucester Citizen”, campaigned successfully to have his stay in Germany extended.

Munich,
26 August, ’35: ‘I have justified my extended holiday and
met Hitler. He came to lunch in the same restaurant as Unity Mitford
and I, and I went up to him among his adjutants and told him he was
very popular with young English people, in German. He thanked me and
told Unity Mitford afterwards that he thought me pleasant and he could
always tell an Englishman from an American. She said she had forbidden
me to speak to him in that abrupt way and he said he was very glad I
had, and would give me an autographed photograph and meet me again. I
have been asked to the great Nazi Party demonstrations at Nuremberg
which begin on the 9th (September) and last a week. All expenses are
paid. Now I must go and see a labour camp.’ (TTTS p71)

Nürnberg,
8 Sept.’35: ‘I really have been doing such exciting things
this week….besides meeting Hitler for the second time, when he
signed my copy of his book “Mein Kampf”. [It fell through a
hole in my car the same day, and I never saw it again.] I asked if I
could refute a very anti-Nazi book called ”I Was Hitler’s
Prisoner”, which was published as a serial in the Sunday Express.
The political police gave me a specially stamped copy, which is banned
in Germany, and which I was not allowed to show to anybody, and I was
given special leave to see the concentration camp at Dachau and the
prisons the author wrote about.’ (TTTS p71)

Nürnberg,
18 Sept. ’35: ‘…the Party Rally (described below and
in detail on pp73-4 TTTS) only finished this morning. I cannot really
think coherently after this week. It has been so wonderful to see what
Hitler has brought this country back to and taught to look forward to.
I heard him make a speech yesterday at the end of it all which I
don’t think I shall ever forget and am going to have
translated.’

Munich, Sept 20, ’35: ‘Dear
Daddy, the Reichsparteitag was absolutely wonderful. I was just behind
Hitler for all the big speeches. None of the things I want to tell you
I can in a letter, they are so political.’

‘Somebody
among the British community had warned me to be careful of my
friendship with Unity. There were not only Germans in Hitler’s
entourage, like Eva Braun, who were fiercely jealous of her, but also
among the secret service and security police who suspected…that
she might be a British agent. She was under surveillance. So I took
good care to avoid any censure in what I wrote and to make my account
of the Nuremberg Rally particularly ecstatic. It did not need much
artifice. The propaganda drug took quick effect.’ (TTTS p72)

Against
a background of Germany rearming (para 2, p73), evidence for which was
already causing more sober minds to reflect on a potentially bellicose
future for Europe, Micky’s good sense seems to have lost its
voice. Perhaps this was an extension of his predilection, evidenced
earlier in Schloss and villa, to fall under the spell of power, be it
expressed socially, financially, intellectually – or, as in this
case, politically.

‘My mix of ignorance, blindness, and
semi-criminal benevolence, let loose in a world of intensely organised
falsehood, turned me into a dupe. I chose to believe that the labour
camps were part of Hitler’s “solving of
unemployment”. After even the little I had seen in Gloucester, I
was ready to fall for anything which seemed to have done away with it.
I believed that the youth camps, cutting at the root of hereditary and
financial social distinctions, had “abolished class
warfare”, the second of the two evils which were poisoning
the heart of Britain. I ignored that all trade unions had been
disbanded and many of their leaders thrown into prison, or murdered;
and that the same process of elimination had now been completed on most
youth organisations, political, religious, or of any kind other than
those swearing lifelong allegiance to the Führer. I made no
enquiries into the economic and financial juggling which was sustaining
the Nazi Government’s colossal expansion of public works, the
major part directly or indirectly contributing to rearmament. I
retained only what I saw and heard, nearly all of it aimed at vicious
exploitation of emotions originally reputable.’

Recalling
the squads of ‘sunburned and apparently joyous youths’ at
work on public projects, the patriotic and optimistic songs and the
politically correct discussions, Micky comments on p73 that:
‘Presentations, ceremonies, rites of passage, legends of dead
“heroes”, torchlight processions, songs, games, athletics,
free or cheap holidays, comradeship, indoctrination, work, all were
concentrated, theatricalised, sanctified, once a year at
Nuremberg.’ (TTTS pp72)

‘I was determined to see as
much of this apotheosis as I could, and from the best positions, to
which such swastika passes and permits as I had did not entitle me, and
for which I preferred not to plead with Unity. She and her sister Diana
Guinness (soon to be married to Sir Oswald Moseley) were guests of
honour. Goering was said to have called them the perfect types of
German womanly beauty. They seemed so much too good to be true that I
might almost have taken them for props. Tall, flaxen-haired and
cornflower-eyed, their faces perfectly rounded exhausts to a bland
superiority, they strolled through the lounges of the privileged hotels
like a pair of off-duty caryatids; while around them, envying,
admiring, there reported for work the scrubbed squads of
Hitler-maidens and Hitler-matrons, condemned for their few years of
supremacy to support and populate the temples Hitler was raising to
last for a millennium.’

‘I was young, fair if not
blond, I had a British passport and an official Nazi certificate that I
was a representative of the Rothermere Press. I got past outer guards,
reached the tribune of honour, met half-way up about the most evil
satrap of them all, the Jew-baiter Julius Streicher, and heil-Hitlered
my way onto a cliff-top dais thronged with foreign celebrities, from
which I was able to look down on the whole performance from a few feet
behind the star.’ (TTTS pp73-4)

‘How near I came to
being totally hypnotised my letters home show. I wrote in much the same
exalté strain to Guy Burgess. But something in me held back.
Boredom became a help in guarding a little of my spiritual and
intellectual virginity. Everything went on far too long.’

‘Nonetheless,
the hypnosis was powerful enough for me not to write home a word about
the purpose of it all. For this was the Party Rally at which the
infamous anti-Semitic Nuremberg decrees were promulgated. These laws,
the prelude to consummation in the gas chambers, were announced by
Hitler in a speech I did not hear. Obscured and deafened by the
parades, the sieg-heiling, the fly-past of the new air force, the
march-past of the ever-expanding army, and the insane euphoria of a
nation considered to have “found itself”, they had no place
in my letters home.’ (TTTS p74)

‘And Dachau? What
did I write about my day-long visit to this first of the concentration
camps? The answer has given me a second shock. The first was that at
the time I had wished away the truth; the second, long afterwards, a
pretence that I had not really felt that way but had at heart been
sickened.’ (TTTS p75)

Micky ‘..used to tell
(himself) and other people that the same evening I went to the opera
(Mozart), but could not listen for thinking of what I had seen during
the day.’ The story was, of course, bogus. A contemporary
typescript discovered by Micky not many years ago tells the truth about
a period in his life when rationality seems to have been overwhelmed by
emotions the memories of which now evoke only shame.

‘Written
at the time, they claimed that the fair-minded purpose of my visit had
been to correct the imbalance of anti-Nazi propaganda in Britain. But
they soon make blatantly clear that the result of this “seeing
for myself” had been to crossload, and consciously crossload, the
balance against the Nazis into one heavily in their favour.’

The
text recalls ‘..the Commandant’s acknowledgement of the
“severe punishment” given to ex-prisoners, who after their
release had spread stories in Germany and abroad of ill-treatment. On
the first offence, the typescript grants that he told me, they were put
in the “Dark Cells”, in solitary confinement for a period
sometimes of several weeks. Here they have only planks for beds and a
ration of dry bread and water. If the offence is repeated they are
beaten. They are placed face downwards and stripped on a table, with an
S.S. man on either side, and given 25 strokes with a rubber truncheon.
“This penalty”, my typescript amiably continues, “is
not imposed on the same man twice”, to which I added the
nauseating comment, “Those whom it may cause to shudder will
remember that the cat-of-nine-tails is even in England not yet
obsolete”. At no point do I seem to have asked what
kind of trial or possibility of defence the prisoners had been
permitted, if any; nor how the speaking or publishing of opinions in a
slight degree disparaging to Hitler could justify incarceration, let
alone in such places as Dachau, or its punishments.’ (TTTS pp75-6)

P
76 also contains detailed references to “sub-normal”
prisoners known as the Vicious Squad – ‘the kind who, in
the “degenerate democracies” might have been, even in the
Thirties, committed to psychiatric wards, and were later in
Hitler’s Germany used for experiments. “It is a hard thing
to say,” I wrote, “but their faces remain with me like a
nightmare. I had not thought that such features existed outside medical
journals…”’

‘What sort of person was I
then, to write from so sickening an attitude, and attempt such
monstrous exculpations, such contortions to excuse the inexcusable?
What sort was kind intelligent Victor (Cazalet), who had found Dachau
“well organised…not of much interest…?” Or
Lloyd George, or the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, who a couple of years
later paid their private court to Hitler, the instigator of Dachau and
its mass-murderous successors, and found him such good company? Or Guy
Burgess with his evasiveness about the longer-standing camps, tortures,
massacres, in the USSR? Or all the countless others in all classes, all
professions, all ages, in many countries, who carried torches and wore
blinkers for the tyranny in either East or West?’ (TTTS pp76-7)

P
77 also describes in some detail an incident, during his visit to
Stadelheim Prison, when there was at least a glimpse of the later,
unblinkered, Micky.

‘My guides showed off the prison
laundry, where one of the women working was named to me as Frau
Beimler, wife of the German Communist leader and deputy in the former
Reichstag Hans Beimler. Hans Beimler has escaped from Dachau. There had
been a nationwide hue and cry for him. I was allowed to talk to his
wife and whispered in German, “Your husband is safe in
Spain.” Her eyes lit up and I knew she believed me…’
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Beimler_(Communist)

Of
Hitler: ‘And Hitler? I met him briefly first in the courtyard of
the Osteria Bavaria, when I greeted him with my disgusting lie about
“British youth”; secondly, as he came out of his
“House of Art”, when he signed the copy of Mein Kampf I
lost the same afternoon. I used to tell people that he ate in the
restaurant “like a peasant”, though I did not know any
peasants, and that his eyes seemed to bulge and did have
“something hypnotic”. I do remember a kind of shudder
running through the huge audience at Nuremberg when he referred to the
day “whose date I do not know, when I shall close my eyes in
death”. “Wasn’t it awful?” Unity wrote.

‘I
did copy into my scrapbook a passage from the speech on German
rearmament made to the Reichstag on 21 May 1935, which ended “I
cannot better conclude…than by repeating our confession of faith
in peace. May the other nations too be able to give bold expression to
their real inner longing for peace. Whoever lights the torch of war in
Europe can wish for nothing but chaos.” And so on, about
Germany’s “imperishable contribution to this great
work… the renaissance of the West”. I half-believed it.
Millions believed it. Neville Chamberlain wished to believe it. Hitler
believed it himself, so long as he got his way.’ (TTTS pp77-8)

One
particular passage speaks volumes about the effect on his psyche of
Micky’s temporary “Nazification”. Having had his AA
documents fall out of his car (1935) in France, they were later
returned by a Frenchwoman who had found them on the road. ‘I
wrote to her that, had they been found in Germany, they would
have been sent back much sooner, to which she made a dignified reply
that she did not need to be told about German thoroughness, since the
Germans had occupied her family’s farm throughout the 1914-18
war.’ Micky’s unforgivable and uncharacteristic rudeness
earned from his mother a ‘disgusted rebuke’. (TTTS p79)

Pp
79-80: Upon Micky’s return there was surprise at the
understanding shown by the supposedly virulent Marxist Burgess. All of
this was part of a façade constructed to protect his
relationship with the KGB. Burgess had himself visited Germany in the
company of an ultra right-wing politician, and had joined the pro-Nazi
Anglo-German Fellowship. Micky had no idea he was being deceived.
‘My gullibility suited him. Indeed, years later, I had strong
intimations that he had found his friendship with me a useful piece of
jigsaw in his temporary façade.’ (TTTS pp79-80)

Back
in Britain, Micky’s Nazi (but never pro-British Fascist)
“delusion” slowly began to wane, partly as a consequence of
books written by rather more perceptive journalists –
‘..without journalists of their calibre it must have taken me
much longer to grasp that what Hitler’s Germany was offering
me as soul-saving was shit.’ (TTTS p80) - partly because of
a visit made, in 1936, to the West Riding of Yorkshire as part of a
scheme to aid and at the same time obtain experience of, the
unemployed. He would next return to Germany not as dupe but as
uniformed enemy of all that had once encouraged him to betray his true
self.

In 1936, Micky joined the Times newspaper as a foreign
correspondent. By now the scales had been lifted from his eyes and he
could see the Nazis for what they really were. He was growing up; and
his father having been promoted to a senior position within the Duchy
of Cornwall - a royal fiefdom - the family now moved into 10 Buckingham
Gate, a ‘splendid home’ just across
from Buckingham Palace.

This was the period of
Mrs. Simpson, the royal abdication (in which his father was involved)
and Micky’s 24th birthday. On a more sombre note, it was also the
period during which Stella was diagnosed a schizophrenic, her
particular behavioural aberrations having been less a matter of choice
than Micky’s.

His involvement with the Times seems to have
made Micky more of a target for recruitment by Burgess – however,
this never got further than "grooming" for possible espionage, and the
relationship eventually faded away. Britain, at this time, was a major
KGB target and one of Burgess’ associates, Kim Philby, eventually
became head of the counter-espionage section of the Secret Intelligence
Service.

With Hitler’s intentions becoming ever more
clear Micky, in late 1937, enlisted in the Queen’s Westminsters,
a Territorial (reserve) battalion of The
King’s Royal Rifle Corps - (an élite unit within the
British forces – originally raised as the ‘Royal
Americans’). He was commissioned a Second Lieutenant in February
1938, the act completing his reformation as an individual who had come
to terms with the reality of politics in the late ‘30s. Oddly
enough, the Times during this period, was in favour of appeasement, and
backed Chamberlain’s agreement with Hitler at Munich, its editor,
Geoffrey Dawson, claiming that as a consequence the danger of war had
been ‘immeasurably removed’.

In 1939 Micky was sent
to Canada and the US to cover the visit of the King and Queen. Another
account of their visit to Banff, in the Rockies, contains a description
of Micky himself: it reads, ‘By this time Michael Burn had become
the mascot of the pilot train. Young, tousle-headed, debonair and in
the habit of breaking into a Serge Lifar dance in the middle of the
station platform, he did not tie up with my memory of the London Times.
All the Americans loved Michael Burn, although half of them could not
understand what he said. His accent was so veddy, veddy
British..’ (TTTS p108)

In Washington DC, Micky was
presented at the White House, where...’..the President, Franklin
Roosevelt, sat at an enormous desk, flanked by his son as ADC.
“Why”, he declared, leaning forward and reaching out a
hand, “Mr. Michael Burn, from the London “Times".’

In
New York, friends threw a party for Micky. ‘Tallulah Bankhead was
one of the guests. I noticed she wore no bra. “Well,” said
the famous husky voice, ”what can I do for you?” And I was
speechless...’ (TTTS p109)

Soldier of the King

As
a reservist, Micky was called to the Colours on the outbreak of war.
Shortly thereafter he volunteered for the newly forming Independent
Companies, precursors to the Commandos, who were to attempt to
forestall the Germans in Norway. ‘We were to be guerrillas, to
hinder their advance north and give (regular formations) time to seize
the port of Narvik.’ But the formations were ill-trained, and
poorly organised and led, and the whole expedition was one total
cock-up. ‘We came upon vast depots of discarded expeditionary
stores, from which we replenished. I had a small fortune strapped round
me in a leather belt, to pay for food and lodging. “We"ll never
leave you, sir,” said (sergeant) Stan Rodd, eyeing it.’
(TTTS p114)

Eventually the formations were withdrawn, in
Micky’s case on board the liner Lancastria. In March 1942,
en-route to Saint-Nazaire, he would meet her again, passing her bones
as she rested on the bottom, having been sunk with the loss of
thousands, in 1940, just off the entrance to the Loire estuary.

On
return to the UK, Micky became involved, for a time, with a scheme to
raise and train a British “Resistance", made up of men
called Auxiliaries, who would hide out in specially prepared bunkers in
the case of invasion, then become involved in sabotage, the
assassination of collaborators, etc. ‘Gubbins, now a
major-general in Whitehall (Gubbins was the officer in charge of these
units: he later became involved with SOE) bade me take a handful of
Norwegian “veterans” to train underground in Kent as
pioneers of a British “Resistance” should the Nazis land.
Peter Fleming (author: brother of Ian), with a section of Lovat Scouts
(Lord Lovat’s military unit) had already organised woodland
hides, violated churchyards to secrete arms, and placed detonators in
cigars in stately homes likely to be seized as headquarters for
gauleiters.’ (TTTS p115)

Then it was back to his unit for
intensely boring and fruitless anti-invasion duties on south coast
beaches. This was the period when the Commandos were dreamed up, and
recruitment began in the face of stiff opposition from traditionalists.
Of the Commandos Micky writes – ‘But no sooner did the idea
begin to take hold than a farrago of reasonable misgivings, stale
bigotries and personal jealousies sprang up to obstruct our
embodiment.’ (TTTS p115)

The Independent Companies now
began a tortuous transformation into Commando units. To cut a very long
story short, Micky now found himself in No 2 Commando, in charge of 6
Troop, stationed at Paignton, on the south coast of Devon. While
stationed with other Commandos in the Redcliffe Hotel, where a wealthy
civilian élite had sought refuge from the trials of war in
London, Micky and others blew out most of the windows in a botched (too
much explosive – as always) attempt to remind them there really
was a war on.

‘With us any crackpot project had a
chance. A naval commander was among our first encounters. Coming of a
family accustomed to winning the Victoria Cross, he had only
managed a DSO himself, and was
consequently called “the Coward”. He put to us a project
for spiking the big guns the Germans had installed at Cap Gris Nez. To
get there we were to walk across the twenty miles of sea-bed, kept
going underwater by oxygen paid out from the white cliffs.’ (TTTS
p117)

Because there was so much hostility to the idea of
Commandos, nothing very much seemed to happen right away, the
inactivity not sitting at all well with Micky. ‘Millions in
blitzed cities walked to work. Plymouth (close to Paignton) was
devastated. We became troubled about our unemployed elitism. From
Tom’s (Tom Peyton) and my sea-front hotel in Paignton I wrote to
my mother, “We are all grossly overfed and spoilt. One has to
knock at the door and ask if the soldiers are in when one wants them
and instead of issuing orders for a parade, I am thinking of sending
out cards: Capt. Burn At Home 0900-1300 hrs. Uniform. R.S.V.P. Please
bring your rifle”.’ (TTTS p118)

During this period,
circa May 1941, the family’s home in Buckingham Gate, London, was
badly damaged by a bomb. Also during this period, Micky changed his
religion. ‘It was during this period of training at Paignton that
I began to go to mass with the Roman Catholics in the Commando and was
received into the Roman Catholic Church. This happened at nearby
Buckfast Abbey. It had been on my mind for some time...’ one
primary reason being his continuing sexual conflict. ‘I needed
someone on whom I could unload my conflicts with perfect trust, and
preferred the Roman priesthood because of their ”vast knowledge
of the human heart”.’ (TTTS p119)

The scene now
moves to Dumfriesshire, in western Scotland, as all Commando units were
moved well to the north for training once the main invasion scare had
receded. This selection of quotes hints at the prevailing atmosphere of
impatience for action; although it has to be said there
was also a rewarding social scene
in and around Moffat, particularly for Micky. In his social
position he was able to pop up to London for dinner at The Ritz, or
Claridges, and to attend shows. In Moffat itself there was the
distraction of Mora Hope-Robertson, plus visits from Dinah, and the
occasional drive to Glen, the baronial home of his friends the
Tennants. Although Micky was in love with Lance-Sergeant Maurice
‘Boy’ Harrison, that didn’t prevent him from
discussing marriage with Maurice’s sister Molly, also a visitor
to Moffat.

‘Suspense produced a dangerously impatient
recklessness in Commandos. For all (our) transgressions...Charles
Haydon (In charge of the Special Service Brigade, to which all Commando
units belonged) had to take the flak, and did, month after month
defending us against those on high who remained set on abolishing us.

‘In
Whitehall (where all the main government offices were) several plotted
to get rid of our Director (Sir Roger Keyes was Director of Combined
Ops at the time), My troop nearly got rid of him
physically… Sir Roger was making an inspection of 2
Commando. No. 6 Troop was chosen to put on a demonstration. We were at
Moffat, in Dumfriesshire, a blessed place for us all. HQ was thirty
miles away at Dumfries. Tom and I lived at the Star Hotel, whose
proprietors, Mr. and Mrs. Butler, had become surrogate parents to us
all, and Mrs. Butler, with a son on service far away, so much a mother
that I gave out that no one was to marry a local girl without her
approval. Their bar became a meeting place for all ranks.

‘For
Sir Roger’s visit we chose the Devil’s Beef Tub, a vast
amphitheatre five miles to the north flanked by a main road (this
feature is a huge natural depression, like a giant bowl sunk into the
earth). I had planned that one section should give covering fire while
another scaled a precipitous slope to take possession of the road. On
top of the slope was a
jutting eminence suitable as an
observation point. Staff cars arrived, disgorging Keyes, Haydon and
their adjutants. They took up their positions and the demonstration
started. Tracer made graceful parabolas (live ammo was being used),
obviously delighting our Director who advanced further and further as
the scalers neared the summit. Haydon said, “Can you stop them
now?” as covering fire thudded below and, on the road behind,
tracer soared over passing cars. I did stop them - but only just in
time. That evening, Mrs. Butler. whom we had invited to watch, remarked
that it had all been very interesting. “And what was that
whistling noise?” she asked!’ (TTTS pp120-1)

The
continuing inactivity - the absence of raids for an organisation
specifically trained to carry them out - prompted Micky, late in 1941,
to contact Gubbins again. Gubbins by this time was in charge of the
Baker Street offices of SOE (Special Operations Executive), the
semi-secret organisation set up to execute Churchill’s order to
“set Europe ablaze” against Nazi occupation. The idea was
that with his knowledge of French and German, Micky might soon be
trained as a spy and parachuted into France.

‘I went
unhappily to London in mid-January (1942). My parents had moved to a
house outside London. I slept in the ruins of 10 Buckingham Gate and
reported to Gubbins at Baker Street. My records next provide four
scribbled sheets containing notes for a letter to Gubbins asking to be
released....their gist was that I hoped to be dropped in France and
would be no good on his staff in London.’ (TTTS p125)

Micky
does not elaborate on the SOE idea, except to say that his being
dropped into France as an agent was not on the menu. His personal SOE
file was closed for 66 years.

‘Events hurtled me towards
a climax. One morning towards the end of February 1942 I was in London
with Dinah Jones, a most dear girl-friend. In a taxi going along the
Mall I saw Charles Newman with a briefcase hurrying past Marlborough
House towards Whitehall. I had not known he was in London and guessed
it must be for a conference. I stopped the taxi and got out. His voice
and expression were almost jubilant. “You’ve got to come
back,” he said. “This is it.” He took me back and I
found the Commando at Ayr in a state of mystified excitement. The mood
was sad as well. Charles had to select two groups, a small one to
disappear at once to study how to wreck a dockyard (the 2 Commando
demolition contingent), the other much larger to receive intensive
training in street fighting at night.’ (TTTS p125)

When
the training was complete, the troops took a train from Ayr to the
Clyde where they boarded the PJC for the voyage down the west coast to
Falmouth. (Troopship Princess Josephine Charlotte)

‘The
troops… did not need to be told that they were going into mortal
danger. But at the end, on orders, I advised them to make wills in
their Army pay-books and write letters which would be delivered to
their families and loved ones if they did not come back. The atmosphere
of the last days is covered by the final entries in Maurice ”Boy"
Harrison’s diary.’

Mon: 23 March: ‘...the
whole thing is extremely risky and I feel nervous. I don’t know
whether I really believe that I’ll come back, or just hope so. I
do so want to - there are so many good times ahead.’ (TTTS p130)

Tues:
24 March: ‘Went to Mass first thing, gaining that deep pleasure.
One way and another I spent quite a long time in the sun, which made me
very sunburned and full of sunshine.’

Wed: 25 March:
‘Wrote a letter home to be opened if I am unlucky. I tried hard
to say what I felt, but at the time being so full of life it was
difficult to think of what I would write if I were dead. Somehow, too,
I feel I shall be OK - perhaps this is because I hope so with all my
heart. Feel a little tired of talking about the (raid) - am just
waiting now to do it well and then go home on leave!’ He had just
three days left to live.... (TTTS p131)

The Saint-Nazaire Raid: 26-28 March, 1942

Micky
sailed to France on board Motor Launch 192, captained by Lt-Commander
Billie Stephens. The launch was part of an ill-armed fleet assembled
for the purpose of carrying to Saint-Nazaire Commando troops tasked
with destroying the port’s great “Normandie” dry
dock, the only such facility on the Atlantic seaboard capable of
accommodating Germany’s largest warships. It had been made clear
before departure that this was likely to be a one-way trip; and yet, so
unyielding were the bonds cementing Commando units together, no one
could really imagine encountering any physical force strong enough to
tear them apart.

Micky’s immediate party consisted of his
subaltern, Lieutenant Tom Peyton, and thirteen other ranks. Other
members of 6 Troop were distributed throughout the fleet. The team
would enter the Loire estuary at the head of the starboard column of
troop-carrying MLs and go ashore in the Old Entrance, a small, enclosed
anchorage right next to the “Normandie” dock. They would
then fight their way to the north end of the dock and block access to
German reinforcements approaching the battle area from the north.

The
fleet entered the estuary just before 0100 on the morning of Saturday
28th, with everyone at action-stations. As Micky describes it: ‘I
went round my group, standing to by the two 20mm crew-manned guns or
lying down behind Brens, or simply with grenades and Tommy-gun, and
wished each man luck. Tom Peyton was in command of the soldiers aft. I
stayed forward of Billie Stephens who was on the bridge and commanded
all the MLs. I had with me Harrison and one or two others. Right
forward, sunk into his hatch, Willie Bell had become a round face and a
steel helmet. By one o’clock we could smell the countryside and
see outlines of houses and hedgerows on each bank.‘ (TTTS pp135-6)

The
seventeen small boats surrounding the explosive-filled destroyer
Campbeltown whose job it was to ram the “Normandie”
dock and destroy it, got almost to within
sight of their target before the German defences woke up – at
which point they were swept by a deluge of fire. Almost immediately
ML192 was hit, set ablaze, and thrust, out of control, towards the
granite wall of the Old Mole. Shocked and disorientated, Micky:
‘was aware of buildings, a wall towering up, and heard Billie
Stephens shout, “Jump! Now’s your chance!”
“Why? I thought. What for? We haven’t landed. I told
Harrison to follow me, went to the starboard rail and looked aft. The
ship was on fire, sheering rapidly away from a stone wall. I jumped,
loaded with grenades, swam a few strokes and thought I was going to
drown. Arthur Young had already jumped and landed on the steps in the
wall. He had been wounded in the foot, but sitting there he managed to
reach an arm far enough to lug me onto them. The ML bumped away. Firing
was going on all round.’ (TTTS pp136-7)

As he sat there in
a daze, a body drifted past. It was that of Tom Peyton, but in his
present mental state it meant nothing to Micky. Harrison had also gone,
later to be listed as one of the eight commandos lost from this one
boat. Others of his troop were to die elsewhere on the river.

With
other boats coming on to make a landing at the Mole, Micky got a grip
and climbed the steps onto the top of the Mole, where he bashed a
German over the head with the butt of his Colt .45. He was the only one
of his men in condition to press on towards their target; but between
him and the main body of the dockyard lay two German bunkers. Without
thinking he ran on: ‘North for me meant right-handed, away from
the Mole. In my immediate way was a gun emplacement with two Germans on
top. I doubled across the open space. They had seen me. They could not
miss. I felt a sharp stab in the inside of my left thigh, another in my
right arm, a third in my back. The wounds were to heal in a few days. I
was very fit; for small injuries self-healing.’ (TTTS p137)

Somehow
or other, Micky, completely alone, made it almost one kilometre to his
party’s targets through a dockyard still very much in German
possession. Once there he attempted to destroy two flak towers –
but could not do so by himself. He then returned, again alone, to the
Commando assembly area only to find that the small boats detailed to
carry them home again, had been sunk or set on fire.

At one
point he was captured, but was able to talk his way to freedom by
claiming, in excellent German, that he was too important a potential
prisoner to be shot. The delay gave Troop Sergeant-Major George Haines
time to stage a rescue. Later he took part in a mass escape attempt,
but with typical independence of mind, thought he had a much better
chance on his own.

Having been earlier up at the northern end of
the docks, he had recognised how bridge “M" offered a possible
chance of escape into the suburbs of the town. So later, as the whole
Commando group left the Mole to make for the lift-bridge over the New
Entrance lock, he decided to take the alternative route and left the
group, in the company of two of his own Troop, Riflemen Paddy Bushe and
Tommy Roach. They crossed the Old Entrance and moved north up the
dockside.

‘I had just been there and back on my own, had
encountered no one and knew where the cover was…
..having already escaped three German captors once by speaking German,
I would try the same bluff again if challenged a second time.
Tommy-guns and tin hats would give us away. I ordered Paddy and Tom to
dump them and follow me (this left them with no means of defence!). We
set off on the road between the warehouses and the submarine basin. We
were challenged. I called back, in German, “The English have
landed”. We strode on towards the swing
bridge which would give us access into the town and this time were
fired on. Paddy and I ran into...cover. I looked for Tom Roach, and
called him, but there was no reply.’ (Tommy, left with no weapon,
had been killed.)

The two took refuge in the boiler-room of a
ship where they were captured the following morning. ‘Paddy and I
were marched through the streets hands-up, with bayonets at our backs.
French men and women made friendly gestures and, seeing that a German
team were photographing us...I formed my fingers into a V-sign. We met
Sam Beattie, wearing only a blanket (having just been brought ashore).
At the moment Paddy and I met him, we were quite near the dry dock. It
was past 10 o’clock and there was HMS Campbeltown still embedded
in the caisson. It was hard not to show dismay, or seem in a hurry to
get clear of her. We joined Charles and the rest in a guard-room, all
equally on edge and trying not to show it, all wondering what the hell
has happened, what has gone wrong, why has she not gone up?’
(TTTS pp139-141)

A prisoner of the Reich

Following
the eventual explosion of HMS Campbeltown – several hours late,
but heard by Micky and many others of the prisoners – the
surviving Commandos and sailors were moved away. Their
first camp was Marlag und Milag Nord, where his primary concern was to
learn of the fates of his men, both his own party and another, smaller
party, commanded by his second subaltern, Lieutenant Morgan Jenkins.

‘For
weeks, for months, not knowing about the remainder of my group and
Morgan’s kept hope alive. News came through slowly, from families
via the Red Cross, from wounded who rejoined us from hospital, from
those who had got home. Jack Heery wrote to me. Jack had got home in
one of the four MLs…that did. So had six more of my troop, who
had not been with Morgan or me, and were transferred from a sinking ML
to one of our destroyer escorts. One or more of the rest might still be
brought into our camp, caught while trying to escape, might even have
escaped the whole way home. But a time came when I could pretend to
myself no longer. Until then it had been as if I had been going over
and over that night’s events in front of a blurred screen with
sound and commentary off. Hope had muted them, confusing what in my
heart I knew to be the truth. Now it came on full blast. The guns came
on, the explosions, the cries from the boats, the river, the burning
oil and the hideous nature of their deaths. Night passed, the sun rose
for a moment over the Loire like a Viking funeral pyre. And then all
grandeur died, river and sky turned grey, the beach was strewn with
bodies of dead men and burnt-out ships, and I knew that all those I had
waited for had been killed.’(TTTS pp143-4)

At least the
idea of giving the ‘V’- sign, in the hope that newsreel
footage of it might be picked up by British Intelligence, seemed to
have worked as planned.

‘In prison camp…I soon
knew that my parents knew of my survival, and I could stop worrying on
their behalf. Well before such a thing could be expected, I received a
message via the Red Cross. Who on earth could have sent it? I made a
joke of it to the others. Obviously, now that I had become a prisoner,
the whole of Europe knew. Probably it came from Hitler. I had not
actually met Mussolini, but he was sure to have heard, and soon pasta
and chianti would arrive from him. Meanwhile I was baffled.

‘I
had become friendly in the mid-1930s with a Dutch lady called Ella van
Heemstra. When war was declared, in September 1939, she wrote to me
from her family home in Holland. She hoped that, if ever I happened to
be stationed near Folkestone, I would go and see her ten-year-old
daughter by her English husband, whom she had divorced. The child was
in the care of a family in the village of Elham, The Queen’s
Westminsters (NB: Micky’s Territorial unit) were at Folkestone
nearby, so I visited the delicate, rather lanky child. Ella withdrew
her back to Holland just before Hitler occupied it. One evening in the
spring of 1942 she went to the movies. She arrived in time for the
newsreel. It was Goebbels’s propaganda film of the British
“fiasco” at St Nazaire, and suddenly “It’s
Micky!” she exclaimed, seizing the person next to her who
happened to be a German officer. There I was with my hands up. She
passed off her excitement, and went several times more, confirming from
my three or four appearances that she was right. From the Dutch Red
Cross she found out my name, number and PoW camp; hence the message.

‘The
cinema belonged to a Jewish lady, a friend of Ella’s. It had been
confiscated, but she had not been deported and still had keys. At night
the courageous pair slipped in, went up to the projection-box, ran the
newsreel, stopped it at the frames containing me, snipped out one of
each appearance and spliced it. Ella had the frames enlarged. I next
heard from her after the liberation of Holland as the war was ending.
Her country was suffering terribly. Many Dutch were starving. Her
daughter was gravely ill. Could I send cigarettes to buy penicillin? I
sent loads, and she wrote back that the barter had saved the
child’s life. Later she came to England and gave me the
reel-enlargements. I went to Vienna for The Times and lost touch with
her. One day I opened a Sunday newspaper on a big photograph of a
mother whom I recognised, because I knew her, and a girl whom I
recognised, because she was famous. The mother was Ella, the girl her
daughter…the international film-star Audrey Hepburn.’
(TTTS p145-6)

Following a short period of incarceration all
together, the Commando prisoners were moved away, in the case of
officers, to mighty Spangenberg Castle – Oflag 1X A/H
(www.pbase.com/solomonsiu/spangenberg)

Most remained here
throughout the war; however two of the Commandos, including General
Purdon, still extant, managed to escape for a time, ensuring an
eventual move to Colditz. ‘The rest of us, under Charles
Newman’s direction, worked on an unsuccessful tunnel designed to
go into the foundations and then across the moat.

‘Many
prisoners believed that the Germans had had a stool-pigeon at
Spangenberg. He would have known about talks I gave there. Prisoners of
war are literally a captive audience, ready to listen to almost
anything. As a politically-minded journalist before the war, what I had
to say was of interest, I had described the shock
given me by unemployment in Gloucester and the Yorkshire coalfields;
how I had gone to Germany believing that Hitler had “cured”
it. For a time been taken in, and then had my eyes opened to the truth;
and how disillusion had been fed by my experience of Appeasement on The
Times and the fiasco of the “campaign” in Norway. As a
result my opinions had moved decisively Left. Ronnie Swayne, who was
among my audience, described me at that time as being “slightly
to the Left of Major Attlee”. This was hardly extreme.
Nonetheless some of the older officers, who had been prisoners since
the fall of France in 1940, objected and asked General Victor Fortune,
senior officer in Spangenberg and of all prisoners in Germany, that my
talks should be stopped. He had been at school at Winchester about the
turn of the century and distinguished himself at cricket. He sent for
me and asked, “You’re not going to say anything against the
Royal Family, are you?” I assured him that I was not.
“Good,” he replied, “because by them we stand or
fall”. He declined to stop my talks. “Why should I?”
he answered the complainants. “At Winchester I once took five
catches off his father’s bowling.”’ (TTTS pp152-3)

Micky
remained in Spangenberg for about a year before being moved, with the
other Roman Catholics, to Oflag 1X A/Z, Rotenburg-an-der Fulda

In
Rothenberg Micky was soon placed in solitary confinement. He believes
he was singled out because of information passed on to the Germans by
the Spangenberg stool-pigeon who moved
with Micky to Rothenberg. This individual would
have listened to his stories of having visited Germany, met the
Führer and initially applauded Hitler’s success with
banishing unemployment. His current Leftist stance would also not have
been missed, conveying the impression of someone who had switched
allegiances in the past and might do so again - see below for details.

‘This
was very unusual indeed. No accusation had been made against me. On the
contrary, a pleasantly spoken German officer had visited me in my cell
with a proposal. The German authorities would like to move me to a
“special” camp where conditions would be much more
agreeable. I would be allowed parole and walks outside. Girls would be
found for me. I would have movies, a room to myself, hot baths, and
opportunity to study and write in peace. In return for these favours I
would be (though he did not use the word) indoctrinated, and then taken
on tour round British PoW camps to explain to their misguided inmates
that we, rulers of a vast Empire, had through the folly of our
Government got ourselves on the wrong side by our alliance with the
“barbaric” Russian Communists. We should be on the side of
National Socialist Germany fighting for “civilisation”. I
refused. Apart from that stale old rigmarole – Germany and
Britain were “blood brothers” and so on, - prisoners of war
were forbidden to give parole. The officer seemed to have expected
refusal and went away, still polite, saying that he would allow me time
to think it over. (TTTS p152)

‘A stool-pigeon could also
have known something concerning me at Rothenberg. German propaganda had
started to make much of a mass grave their armies were said to have
excavated in the forest of Katyn, near Smolensk, and found crammed with
the bodies of murdered Polish officers. The Germans were saying that
the Russians had murdered them, and the Russians were accusing the
Germans. A delegation of high German officials arrived at Rothenberg
and invited representatives of the Allied prisoners to go to Katyn and
see the evidence of Russian guilt for themselves. A senior American and
British officer consented to go. I made a protest. The Soviet Union was
now our ally, and it was disgraceful to lend ourselves to any campaign
against it.

‘My protest, duly reported, would certainly
have been taken by the Germans as evidence that I was pro-Communist and
therefore deutschfeindlich (hostile to Germany). This evidence, coupled
with the information that in earlier years I had been deutschfreundlich
(friendly to Germany) and actually met the Führer and had Mein
Kampf signed for me by him, made me worth a little attention,
either as a subversive or a possible collaborator. I had also been a
political journalist and was known to be writing a book, for which I
was using books on German history in the camp library. “Such men
are dangerous”: fit either to be used or, if they refuse, to be
put where they can do no harm. The officer’s visits to me in my
cell ceased to be polite. He told me that if I continued to reject his
proposal I would be sorry. I would be sent “somewhere I would not
like at all”. He gave me twenty-four hours to make up my mind. I
took him to mean a concentration camp, Dachau perhaps. Eight years
before I had been shown it as a privileged visitor and allowed myself
to be deceived. Now I would see it, suffer it, in its
reality…… Twenty-four hours passed. The officer
reappeared. I repeated my refusal. And so, instead of Dachau,
Colditz.’ (TTTS p153)

Colditz – Oflag 1V C

Again
alone, although under escort, Micky was taken to Colditz, via Leipzig.
During the journey by rail his guard fell asleep. Micky removed the
cartridges from his rifle, only handing them back to the astonished
guard upon their arrival at the station: it had seemed the polite thing
to do.

Colditz was the “bad boys’ camp”, for
which Micky, who raised suspicion anyway by arriving alone, did not
quite seem to fit the bill. Corran Purdon and Dick Morgan were able to
confirm his having taken part in the raid. Otherwise it was a question
of yet again being saved by “Top People”, for Colditz was
home not only to inveterate escapers, but to a group of well-born
and/or influential hostages known as “The
Prominente”.www.colditzcastle.net/about-colditz/prominente/.

‘I
had been allocated to the most élite mess-table in this most
élite of Oflags. (known as the Bullingdon, after the exclusive
Oxford drinking club). A majority were Lords and Lairds. Two of them
were held under special surveillance, on orders from leaders of the SS,
in the hope of using them as hostages if and when Germany was defeated:
(known as “the prominentes”) One was Charlie Hopetoun,
whose father, Lord Linlithgow, had been Viceroy of India, the other
John, Master of Elphinstone, a nephew of the Queen. John Arundell of
Wardour had inherited one of the oldest Roman Catholic peerages in
England. John Winant, whose father was American Ambassador in London,
joined us towards the end. Giles Romilly, a nephew of Winston
Churchill, was also under surveillance and in special danger, having
been captured while an unaccredited journalist; he was also known to be
a Communist.’ (TTTS pp155-6)

‘The prisoners accepted
my account and put my experience as a journalist to very welcome use.
Because I knew shorthand they appointed me to the group who ran the
secret wireless set. It was hidden under the rafters of a vast attic
about 35 yards long. We worked in pairs, alternately, with one of us
acting as “scribe” to take down the news. Dick Howe and
Jimmy Yule knew about signals…; Jim Rogers, a mining engineer,
and I were the others.

‘Every evening guards were posted
to give warning of Germans as the team on duty entered the attic by
opening the huge steel door with a forged key. The hide was near the
far end of the attic. A third officer followed us to make sure we left
no traces, cleaning up our footprints and putting back in place
anything which, however slightly, we might have moved. By lifting
floorboards and removing a crosspiece between the rafters in a
gable-end, he exposed a narrow hole through which Jimmy Yule and I (NB:
in the “Observer” article Micky describes his partner as
Dick Howe) wriggled as fast as we could. It was not easy. He then left
the attic and, if the coast was clear, returned after the news to
liberate us. I read it out to the heads of sleeping-quarters from my
notes.

‘Jimmy and I, wearing earphones, sat on an
upholstered bench side by side, with a small table and the radio in
front of us. We had electric light; the tiles above and walls were
lined with blankets. On two or three evenings we heard the Germans
scuffling about in the attic with nothing between us and them but a
thin lath-and-plaster wall and a blanket. We were scared stiff of
sneezing, but the hide was never found. In case of emergency the floor
had been scraped right down to the ceiling plaster of the mess-room
below, and our drill would have been to kick a hole in
the plaster and lower, first, the
radio, then treasured material for escapers (money, maps, forged
passes, etc.) and finally ourselves. (TTTS pp153-4)

‘I
helped them, of course, as did everyone, in minor duties such as
monitoring the routines of sentries. But my role in the radio hide gave
me the chance of lifting people’s spirits, on such evenings as
D-day, or the crossing of the Rhine, or at the end as the Americans
approached who were to set us free. I felt I was a link in the
lifeline of a community. It made me feel less guilty about the avidity
with which I pursued my private aims.’ (TTTS p154)

‘At
my first camp, Spangenberg, I was mildly socialist.’ (But) By now
I was well on the way to Marxism. At Colditz a few of us formed a study
group, of which one member was Giles Romilly, Churchill’s
nephew….. . I gave highly biased lectures on Marxism to large
audiences. Outside the castle walls such
lectures had been punishable by death for years. I
was told that one senior British officer forbade his subordinates to
attend, and that another wished to have me tried for treason after the
war. But, so far as I am aware, no one gave me away to the
Germans.’

Post-war Micky’s views on Marxism would
change radically, ‘After the war I asked The Times to send me to
one of the Communist Countries, and became their correspondent in
Eastern Europe. There I witnessed the enforced revolutions, attended
the infamous sham trials, knew at first hand of the disappearances, the
tortures, the lies, and concluded that Marxism in contemporary practice
was odious; as a political theory…manure for the dictatorships
and so for brutality…’

‘But I do not regret
the stage I passed through in Colditz. At least I was seeking a better
world, free of the disgrace of the past. One night a dream expressed
these feelings for me. I dreamt that the fields beneath the castle had
turned into a huge Asiatic plain, on which a medieval battle was
raging, with spears and banners and caparisoned horses, like a battle
in an Uccello painting. Suddenly it parted, and beneath the hooves I
saw a young Chinese soldier, terribly wounded. I went to help him, and
as he died he said, “All men are brothers”.’

‘I
see now that part of what we had been fighting for was not the
substance of my lectures, but the liberty granted me to give them. If
many of my arguments were mistaken, I went at once to examine them in
action, and altered them as a consequence. Had I not done so, I might
have remained a captive of the ideas, of the intellect, that in Colditz
had helped to liberate me.

‘I am grateful for the
patience Colditz taught me, and for the occasional light into which
study and imaginative art enabled me to tunnel out of its
adversities.’

Referring to the television series which
concentrated purely on the physical aspects of escaping from Colditz,
he comments finally that, ‘I wish the television serial could
have shown something of that relief, that other liberation at Colditz.
But the castle has become a legend, and all legends are constantly
reinterpreted: and perhaps someday someone will swing the cameras wider
and probe that strange castle more profoundly.’

Towards
the end of Micky’s stay in Colditz there appear distinct threads
of unreality which manifested themselves in his views becoming ever
more extreme. Dreams were also sometimes tortured, as of the wounded
Chinese soldier, above. ‘In real life I seemed to be going hard
and heartless, my energy more and more consumed by theory. Doctrinaire
views on class took hold. I informed Grismond Davies-Scourfield, an
admirable officer captured at Calais, who had escaped and spent months
with the Polish Underground, that he was the sort of person “who
was a bar to all social progress”. At home, at dinner with my
parents, holding forth on what Britain of the future must become, I
infuriated my younger brother….’

In
a fortress whose memory remains indistinguishable from the notion of
escapes, Micky, who had no intention of even trying, was very much the
exception.

‘What is meant by ‘escape’?
Release, liberation, are words more to my purpose. They imply removal
into surroundings quite different from those you are inhabiting. The
“physical” escapers wished to leave the castle and get
home. But, for the escaper of the mind, prison enables him to possess
another world for a prolonged period, while remaining physically where
he is.

‘Drink, drugs, sex and gambling have long
been…a form of liberation. Neither of the first two was possible
in Colditz, except for a very occasional booze-up on dangerous
hooch…. . It might be guessed that homosexuality became rife,
but this was not so. Even if desire could have retained its strength,
the crowded conditions and a general censure would have made
satisfaction almost hopeless. Some French prisoners arrived towards the
end of the war, and the first question one of them asked was
“Quels sont les garcons?” Apparently this contingent
had fixed something up among themselves, but they did not strike me as
more liberated than anyone else.

‘I also studied. I learnt
Russian from the Czech prisoners. The Red Cross had arranged all sorts
of courses for German prisoners in Britain and ourselves in Germany.
They supplied books. I read the whole of Keynes’s “Treatise
on Money”, and while still in Colditz received an Honours Degree
in the Social Sciences from Oxford. My studies were intently, even
fanatically, directed: and they, together with my novel, brought me
liberation through the mind.’

‘I had the good
fortune to form a friendship with another prisoner five years younger
than myself, with whom I could talk freely. This was Sub-Lieutenant
Norman (inevitably “Dusty”) Miller RN, a self-taught
engineer from North London, who had left school during the Depression
for a life on the ocean wave, starting in the lowest caverns of the
Merchant Navy. He had been a member of the Young Communist
League. War had promoted him from Red Duster to White Ensign. He
had been torpedoed in the Atlantic, taken prisoner, and arrived at
Colditz after a failed escape. I noticed him at
once, bowling round the yard, spare, handsome, different from the rest,
a loner. Attraction became infatuation, impossible to satisfy in the
circumstances even had he so wished, which he did not, being entirely
heterosexual. Nonetheless a profound friendship burgeoned thanks to a
common envy of something in each of us which the other was without;
Dusty of my education, I of his easy masculinity and knowledge of the
other “Them” (the working-class). We were also linked by
opposite kinds of rejection and success. I had failed with both men and
women; Dusty desired only women and seemed seldom to have failed. On
the other hand he had had difficulty in getting jobs, and when he got
one, and his employers discovered his political opinions, he was
sacked; while I had had jobs waiting for me and, politically, had been
able to say whatever I liked. Our friendship lasted until his death
from cancer in 1985.’ (TTTS pp157-8)

Amongst the stories
exchanged were Dusty’s tales of women, and Micky’s of his
tragic relationship with Dinah Jones. Micky also divulged a tale
relating to his sexual confusion. It is contained in page 158 and
describes an encounter on board a liner returning to the UK from
Canada, in 1939. ‘Victor Rothschild, now a peer…had been
on board. We had been talking together in the Turkish baths when
suddenly he remarked, “I think you are the most homosexual person
I have ever met”. It astonished me; particularly the superlative,
since I had not yet made up my own mind that I was even
positive.’ (TTTS p158)

As recounted on p 95, while in
Colditz Micky learned of a relationship a fellow prisoner had had with
his sister Stella – with whom he shared so many traits, although,
thankfully, not her developing schizophrenia. The revelation,
in such austere circumstances, must have
stirred an, until then, happily dormant pot of emotions relating to the
coolly formal, intensely patriarchal Burn family dynamic.

‘One
night in Colditz we prisoners had one of our rare celebrations on
hooch, distilled from potatoes and raisins from Red Cross parcels saved
over many months. I lay down on the floor among our bunks, waiting to
pass out. A Naval officer lay down beside me. “Are you Stella
Burn’s brother?” he asked. Years afterwards he wrote down
for me what he told me then. He had gone with his sister to Cassis in
the south of France, where his sister had friends among writers and
artists: “The first evening we all migrated to the local bistro
on the quay. I felt a slight fish out of water till I spied a young
girl sitting soulfully by herself. We danced, talked, drank moderately,
and went back to the house. By the time we reached it we both knew that
neither of us wanted to spend the rest of the night alone. Stella had
come to paint; she was very much an amateur and was slightly teased by
the other avant-garde artists. She had recently had a lesbian
relationship but wanted to put that behind her. She quickly brought me
down to earth, removed my naval officer’s veneer and we became
two carefree, laughing and happy people”.’

‘They
stayed in small villages, bathed on deserted beaches, helped with the
vendange. “But she was often sad, temperamental, and rather full
of inhibitions”. He asked her if she thought they should marry,
“to which she answered, ‘But we don’t know each
other.’ She was right.” He wrote to her but she did not
reply, and they never met again.’ (TTTS p95)

Stella, schizophrenic, was destined to die, in a ‘home for incurables’, in January 1954.

Micky was liberated ‘..by the Americans on 17 April, 1945’.

‘I
sat at a real mess-table in a real castle in Saxony. It was for me the
last day of a real war. My head was busy with two things. One was the
last chapter of my novel, which would be called “Yes,
Farewell”, and end with imaginary Russians liberating an
imaginary castle called Durheim. In the courtyard below real Americans
were liberating the real one, called Colditz. The other concern was to
prepare a real dispatch for “The Times” informing the
newspaper of the SS kidnapping of the hostages, which had happened a
few days before. Colonel Tod, who had been our senior British officer
through difficult times, had instructed me to find an American general
as fast as possible and give him this information, with the names of
the hostages. Dusty was to come with me as assistant in case I needed
one. A huge American car was waiting. We were whisked across Germany,
the general found and informed, and the dispatch sent and published in
“The Times” next morning (“From our own
correspondent”). We were then flown home.’ (TTTS p163)

Mary

Born
– Petropolis, near Rio, 10 March, 1897. Second of four children
of Charles Hamilton Walter (originally Levi). Mother – Ada Yeats,
first cousin to WB and Jack Yeats. Married 23 January 1918 to Henry
Booker. Later divorced. Two daughters, Veronica, and Benita (later Lady
Willams).

On one of his many excursions to London whilst a
Commando billeted in Scotland, Micky had taken Dinah Jones to the
Dorchester. They were accompanied by Morgan Jenkins, son of a Welsh
miner, now an officer, and anxious to experience the ‘posh
world’ for the first time.

Dinah was Micky’s
supposed “date”, she at the height of her attempts to
seduce him; nevertheless, true to form, Micky only had eyes for another
– a vision clad in grey, out amidst the dancers, who he described
as ‘…the most beautiful woman I had ever set eyes
on.’

‘Next evening Charles Haydon had asked me for a
drink at his flat.’ (Haydon, Brigadier in charge of all the
Commandos) ‘I rang the bell and this same woman opened the door.
Charles was her first cousin. I had kept her address and towards the
end of May, 1945, during a desolate week, wrote her a stilted little
letter. She answered, and I called on her.’ (TTTS p162)

In
the interim, Mary’s life had been to say the least eventful.
Following her divorce from Henry Booker, she had gone into the business
of ‘interior architecture’, with friends Edward Hulton and
Peter Lindsay. In the early years of the war there had been a
passionate affair with Spitfire pilot Richard Hillary, author of
‘The Last Enemy’ and at the time also involved with
Mary’s film-actress friend Merle Oberon (later Lady Korda).
Hillary had been shot down, badly burned, and put together again by
pioneer plastic surgeon Archie Mcindoe. Just prior to his death in a
flying accident they had spent an idyllic period together, in
Tan-y-Clogwyn, a cottage restored by Mary and Peter in distant north
Wales. Richard’s death was a huge blow from which it might be
argued she never did recover completely.

More than able to look
after herself, Mary became London manager for Miles Aircraft and was in
post, aged forty-eight when Micky came on the scene following his
repatriation.

Amongst other journeys together Mary, took him to
Wales, to stay together in tiny Tan-y-Clogwen. Irrespective of
any vibrations the cottage might have retained from
the Hillary idyll - sensed perhaps only by Mary - the period was
always remembered by Micky as a time of bliss’ Indeed so perfect
was the atmosphere that Mary’s ashes would eventually be spread
upon the waters of the stream running through the meadow below.

Following
a lengthy and at times unpromising courtship, Micky and Mary married on
27 March, 1947, shortly after her 50th birthday. Micky was 35 at the
time and living in the actress Gigi Bajor’s villa in Budapest, as
the Times ‘man in the Balkans’ (where he was widely
believed to be the head of British Intelligence). He later resigned and
began a career as a writer, he and Mary abandoning the London high-life
and moving permanently to North Wales, first to Tan-y-Clogwyn, and then
to Beudy Gwyn.

Geographical isolation notwithstanding, Micky and
Mary although often critically short of cash, still enjoyed periodic
essays into the social whirl – the publisher Teddy Hulton
(Picture Post) being a particular friend and financial rescuer. Teddy
was in love with Mary, and even claimed to have spent the night with
her. Other close friends included philosopher and neighbour Bertrand
Russell, and writer Goronwy Rees, another of Guy Burgess’s KGB
'targets'.

Epitaph

Shortly after the above material was
put together, Micky passed away having suffered a stroke. Amongst
numerous obituaries, both in the UK and in the USA, that of 'The
Guardian' is given below.

←Meic Stephens guardian.co.uk, Thursday 23 September 2010 17.57 BST

Michael
Burn, who has died aged 97, had a life strewn with risks, setbacks,
disenchantments and deceptions, and illumined by love affairs, literary
acclaim and marvellous friendships. Man about town, journalist,
soldier, poet, novelist and playwright, and latterly a breeder of
mussels on the Dwyryd and Glaslyn estuaries of north-west Wales, Burn –
widely known as Micky – lived his life with panache and a debonair
grin. This he maintained whatever befell him, whether incarceration in
Colditz as a PoW or in reporting the communist show trials of postwar
Europe.

There were contradictions in his character, flaws and
conflicts even, which he wrote about with self-knowledge. Born into a
well-to-do home in Mayfair, London, he observed unemployment and the
most appalling poverty while living with a Yorkshire miner's family in
the early 1930s. The experience left an indelible mark on him. By
instinct republican, he was sent to cover the royal visit to Canada and
the US in 1939 and reported it rapturously. For a while he was in
favour of the Nazis, but became a Marxist while a PoW after taking part
in a commando raid at St Nazaire in France in 1942.

He was the son
of Sir Clive Burn, a solicitor employed as secretary to the Duchy of
Cornwall, and his wife Phyllis. The boy was sent to Winchester college
and spent his holidays with grandparents in a villa near Le Touquet on
the Normandy coast. He soon rebelled against the class he had been born
into. At New College, Oxford, he did no work whatsoever and left after
his first year, intent on becoming a journalist. In 1933, drawn by his
love of Wagner, he took flight for Germany, where he moved from castle
to castle as the guest of aristocrats deeply implicated in the rise of
national socialism. He admired what the Nazis seemed to be doing about
reviving the German economy and abolishing the class system, which he
saw as a cancer eating at the heart of British society.

Back in
London by 1934, Burn found a reporter's job with the Gloucester
Citizen, owned by Lord Rothermere, the pro-Nazi owner of the Daily
Mail. Still preoccupied with mass unemployment, he took up the cause of
Forest of Dean miners while, at the same time, enjoying the hospitality
of the Earl of Berkeley. On holiday in Germany in 1935, he went to a
Nazi rally at Nuremberg, met Adolf Hitler, who signed a copy of Mein
Kampf for him, and visited the Dachau concentration camp with Unity
Mitford and her sister Diana Guinness, soon to be married to Oswald
Mosley.

The scales dropped from his eyes on his return to London.
What changed his mind about Hitler was a week spent as a paying guest
in the home of a Barnsley miner, where he saw the effects of economic
depression and social deprivation at their most poisonous. He remained
in contact with the family for the rest of his life. Soon afterwards,
in 1937, he "was received into the Times", whose policy of appeasement
had held sway throughout the 30s.

At the outbreak of the second
world war, Burn joined the Territorials and, after the most basic
training, saw guerrilla action in German-occupied Norway, which ended
in disarray for the British troops. The audacious commando raid of 1942
on the German-held Atlantic port of St Nazaire was more successful,
denying sanctuary to the Tirpitz, the largest of all the German
battleships. The commandos rammed HMS Campbeltown, packed with
explosives, into the harbour defences and then fought their way ashore.
Though typically modest about his role in blowing up installations,
Burn was awarded the Military Cross for his part in the assault.

He
was captured twice in 24 hours, the first time talking his way out of
it in fluent German. As captors led him away, Burn put up his hands
with fingers in a V for victory sign, defying cameras that were
recording the surrender for Goebbels. The shot appeared in his
autobiography, Turned Towards the Sun (2003). At the time, it was seen
in a cinema newsreel in the occupied Netherlands by a friend, Ella van
Heemstra. She sent him a Red Cross food parcel in Colditz, and after
his release, he sent back cigarettes for her to sell in order to buy
penicillin for her seriously ill daughter, the eventual film star
Audrey Hepburn. By now "slightly to the left of Major [Clement]
Attlee", Burn became a Marxist under the tutelage of a fellow officer.

After
the war, he was sent by the Times to Vienna and then to central Europe
with special responsibility for the Balkans, where he made friends with
the hitherto unapproachable Soviet press corps. Among the events he
covered were the rigged trial of Cardinal József Mindszenty, the
Catholic primate of Hungary, who was imprisoned by the communist
government in 1949.

Burn's conversion to Catholicism, his wife
Mary's religion, lasted from about 1940 to 1994, when he left the
Church of Rome on account of its teachings on homosexuality, which he
had practised intermittently since his schooldays. His sexuality caused
him great anguish but he was able to write about it with a light touch.
Mary knew of his homosexuality, considering it "a part of a general
male retardation", he reported, but their marriage, which lasted from
1947 until her death in 1974, turned out to be extremely happy.

The
house known as Beudy Gwyn, with its stunning views across the Dwyryd
estuary near Minffordd in what is now Gwynedd, was renovated by the
Burns in 1951. There Burn resumed his writing career. He had begun as a
playwright with The Modern Everyman (1947) and now had some critical
success as the author of The Night of the Ball (1956). His first novel,
Yes, Farewell (1946), was followed by Childhood at Oriol (1951), The
Midnight Diary (1952) and The Trouble With Jake (1967). He published
five collections of poetry, including The Flying Castle (1954), a
fantasy demonstrating his mastery of rhyming quatrains, and was awarded
the Keats poetry prize in 1973. He also wrote on political and
sociological subjects in such books as The Labyrinth of Europe (1939),
Mr Lyward's Answer (1956) and The Debatable Land (1970).

Burn's
autobiography deals with important events and famous people, but at its
heart, it is the author's own personality – intelligent, modest,
painfully honest, drily witty, courageous, highly principled and
unfailingly urbane – that shines through. The same qualities recur in
his Poems As Accompaniment to a Life (2006).